NPD to Start Tracking MMOG Subscriptions
The NPD Group has announced today that they’re going to start selling quarterly reports tracking “market size and title shares for paid online subscriptions to video games and MMO/PC games, gaming Web sites, and video game console services.”
Well it’s about time. NPD is currently the industry go-to source for monthly retail sales figures, but they are notorious for also under-reporting said numbers; they don’t include sales from major retailers like Wal-Mart, nor do they track digital downloads. It’ll be interesting to see how their MMOG numbers compare with mine (or if they’ll just copy my numbers for their own report).
MartinZ says:
Added on February 12th, 2008 at 11:25 amNPD’s retail sales numbers do reflect total U.S. sales volumes for all retailers (yes, including Wal-Mart). If you ask any of the 3 platform makers, or any of the top Wall Street analysts, most will tell you they consider the numbers to be pretty accurate. You’re right in that they don’t include digital downloads, so for specific titles that are heavily downloaded (e.g. Half-Life 2) they won’t reflect the title’s overall performance.
Not sure if you noticed, but the NPD subscription tracker will only be covering the U.S. market. Since your numbers are global, copying might not be such a good idea.
-MZ
SirBruce (blog author) says:
Added on February 12th, 2008 at 11:55 amMartin,
My apologies on the Wal-Mart thing; I had not heard that Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club are now included as of the middle of the last year. That’s good, although I should probably note that several people I know in the industry continue to repeat the old information that Wal-Mart is not included.
I’ve not spoke a lot with the platform makers or the analysts, but I do speak with the actual developers and publishers, and they’ve always said you under-report their actual sales. But perhaps that was primarily due to the Wal-Mart effect, and that’s less of an issue these days.
The press release doesn’t explicitly say US market only, but that’s good to know.
And of course you’re looking at a much broader segment than just MMOGs. Nevertheless, having your numbers out there will be a very useful sanity check on my own research, and in any case I’m all for more industry data being made available by companies like NPD, comScore, etc.
Kaylakg says:
Added on March 24th, 2008 at 6:38 amthats it, bro
Sebastian says:
Added on March 25th, 2008 at 1:44 amHowdy,
what about number of users of Lineage II? Last year NC Soft has given info about more than 13 kk numer of players worldwide (including all Asian servers).
So…? It is true or just “marketing hype” ?
sincerely
Sebastian
SirBruce (blog author) says:
Added on March 25th, 2008 at 12:19 pmSebastian,
Those would be total number of registered users who have ever played the game. For the purpose of comparing Lineage I and Lineage II to other subscription-based games, I use their monthly active uniques number.